Haste or Waste? Peer Pressure and Productivity in the Emergency Department

Doctors' response to queues: Evidence from a Portuguese emergency department

“…Literature on doctors' behavior mostly studies the supply of medical care under different payment mechanisms, based on the seminal work by Ellis and McGuire (1986). 1 With no financial incentives, physicians' degrees of agency depend roughly on sense of duty, altruism, (Kolstad, 2013;Godager & Wiesen, 2013), and peer or patient pressure (Chan, 2016;Silver, 2016).…”

“…Time constraints drive doctors to optimize based on a time-quality trade-off (Anand et al, 2011;Dugdale et al, 1999). These choices are important, as time spent with patients is related to positive health outcomes (Ogden et al, 2004;Chen, 2009;Silver, 2016) whereas time waiting for treatment is associated with undesirable events (Sivey, 2017;Baker et al, 1991;Bindman et al, 1991).…”

Peers and Motivation at Work: Evidence from a Firm Experiment in Malawi

“…A large literature provides compelling evidence that a worker's own performance depends on her peers and social interactions (Herbst and Mas 2015). Several studies show that worker effort is sensitive to the social pressure that arises when there are externalities from effort due to joint production and team compensation (Mas and Moretti 2009;Gould and Winter 2009;Bandiera, Barankay, and Rasul 2013;Babcock et al 2015;Arcidiacono, Kinsler, and Price 2016;Battisti 2017;Cornelissen, Dustmann, and Schonberg 2017;Jiang 2020;Amodio and Martinez-Carrasco 2018;Silver 2019). For example, Mas and Moretti (2009) find that retail workers in teams appear to engage in monitoring and free-riding behavior that affects productivity.…”

“…When we use the maximum of peer ability as the measure of peer influence, we find statistically significant and positive impacts that are somewhat smaller than estimates based on Equation 1. We find statistically insignificant and positive estimates when we use the minimum of peer ability as the measure.27 An alternative model of peer effects is discussed inSilver (2019). This work innovates relative to the literature on workplace peer effects by focusing on group match effects that capture the influence of working with a particular co-worker group.…”

“…This work innovates relative to the literature on workplace peer effects by focusing on group match effects that capture the influence of working with a particular co-worker group. As an exploratory exercise, we have implemented an approach based onSilver (2019) and found there are important worker-by-peer group match effects in our setting. Specifically, workers are 24.3 percent more productive when working in a two-standard deviation faster peer group environment.…”